


not just for work (isn’t for play)

by coffeecrowns



Series: fics inspired by real uk queer history [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: ADHD Daisy, Autistic Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Canon stuff u know, Character Study, Cuddling & Snuggling, Eating Disorders, Eye Trauma, Food, Friendship, Gen, Hunt gives you animalistic thought patterns, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist With a Cane, Nonbinary Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Past Police Brutality, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Queer History, Stimming, Trauma Recovery, post Buried, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:54:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24902665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeecrowns/pseuds/coffeecrowns
Summary: After the Buried, Daisy doesn't want to be alone and gets a haircut. Jon gets adopted, a hug, and some skirts.It's a fair trade.
Relationships: Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: fics inspired by real uk queer history [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1805893
Comments: 22
Kudos: 289
Collections: tma fics





	not just for work (isn’t for play)

**Author's Note:**

> hi hello i love these two! 
> 
> anyways I wrote this bc I wanted to write these two as neurodivergent trauma siblings, bc i am a neurodivergent trauma baby. my jon here is a transmasc enby. 
> 
> title is from "my boy builds coffins" by florence
> 
> ily Shannon
> 
> slightly spoilerly context for TW:
> 
> \- the implied/ref SH is both about past, non canonical typically imagined SH AND about the canon eye stuff. it's just talked about in the same tone as canon, but it is there! 
> 
> \- the eating disorders tag is on here bc both jon and daisy struggle with eating and body image. it's not in the "real world" sense but instead the consequences of being an avatar and the aftermath of the buried. both of them are working on better habits, but food and bodies are a preoccupation in a much more major way than SH is
> 
> -homophobia (and queerphobia generally) is referred in part of police shit, and in Section 28, which was real UK law outlawing "promotion of homosexuality" and the characters experiences with this law.

Daisy went into the Buried fifty pounds heavier than she came out. Her blonde hair was shoulder length and healthy going in. Now it falls out in clumps, thin, brittle, filthy, even as it’s grown nearly twice as long, reaching all the way down her ribs. 

She emphatically does not miss the Buried. But she is not a fan of the way her hair flutters around her ears now. Daisy can’t be alone, because she doesn’t trust herself, because there’s a part of her that is trapped in the dark, because she's a monster in repose and if she tastes blood again it will be over. 

They live in the archives now. All of them. There’s a part of her that likes that, a feral part purring, that likes having all her people in one place. There’s a part of her that hates it, hates the Eye’s domain, that misses her flat, that misses having a den to return to. 

She’s with Jon, and he braids his hair before bed. His scarred fingers still glide through his damp hair. It’s soothing to watch. His hair is dark and shiny and healthy. She knows first hand how soft it is. He turns to her, studies her for just a moment. 

“I can help you with your hair, if you would like.” Jon says. 

“Can we cut it off?” she asks, suddenly breathless. She’s thinking about taking scissors to it herself, maybe even a knife, hacking away at the awful stuff. Only she gets tired fucking brushing her hair these days. Her arms are sore and weak after a ponytail. 

“I would like to help.” Jon offers, mouth neutral but eyebrows furrowed. “It isn’t pity. I hate the texture of cut hair and would like to have as much control over it as possible.” 

“Jon, I’m tired. I don’t care as long as it gets buzzed.” 

Jon is used to living in a body that wants him dead, and she appreciates his know-how. He brings her a towel to sit on, and then sits on the closed lid of the toilet. His cane balances against the wall, and she could reach it just as fast as he could. It makes her stupid animal brain relax even as he sits behind her.

He has all her hair in a couple of ponytails, and cuts each one softly, with just a soft scrap of the scissors against her skull. It’s nice. He lays each clump of hair down gently on some toilet paper beside him. 

Eventually, he turns on the clippers, runs them over every inch of her scalp and the back of her neck. He takes a cloth and wipes down her head, which is only slightly strange, but then he runs his hands over her hair. It feels really nice. 

“Sorry,” he says, pulling his hands away abruptly just as they were pleasantly warm. “It’s hard to make sure it’s even and I just. I shouldn’t have assumed.” 

“It’s nice.” She replies. 

“Right. Alright.” 

Eventually, she gets to look in the mirror. She likes it. She looks like the kind of queer other constables used to accuse her of being. 

“It’s different,” she says, unable to bring all those ideas into words. 

Jon looks slightly worried, biting at his lip. “That was the goal, wasn’t it?” She smiles, he relaxes, and agrees. 

It’s eleven in the morning. She’s wandered into Jon’s office seven times. Daisy is exhausted and doesn’t want to sit still, can’t focus even on attempting to think about the fucking apocalypse. Basira is so careful with her, and god she’s in love with this woman, but she can feel herself being annoying. 

So she’s wandered into Jon’s office seven times. She’d feel worse about it, knowing how fast he falls off the rails when distracted. Only he’s just as distracted. His hair is in a new style every time she walks in. She isn’t going to bring it up until on lucky interruption number seven, his hair is in two space buns. 

“I didn’t think you knew about alternative fashion trends.” She says, as an opener. 

“What?” Jon asks, obviously. 

“The, uh, buns. Cute. Trendy on tumblr.” 

“Why is everyone surprised that I know about the internet?” 

“Do you want a list?” She isn’t actually sure if it’s a genuine offer. 

“Tim already did.” For a minute he seems shocked at his own words, and the grief and guilt sits heavily in the office. 

“Twin buns is a good hairstyle. Balanced weight, hair stays away from my face, feels pretty.” Jon actually blushes on that last reason. 

Daisy isn’t going to say anything like, _you are quite pretty,_ not because it isn’t true but because she knows people take that wildly. Sometimes. She thinks it might be a safe, and even a kind thing to say to Jon. 

“Pretty is nice. I think it would solve at least two problems if you got your hands on a skirt you really liked.” She smiles widely, both because she thinks she’s funny and so Jon knows it’s in good fun. 

He looks at her, “What two problems?”

“It’s gonna depend on the skirt.” 

Basira comes in, hours later, after they’ve been online shopping for hours and put several skirts on Jon’s institute credit card. Daisy is hungry for real food, and it only adds to her contentment. 

  
  


Another late night sees them in the breakroom. Daisy sits across from Jon on a deeply comfortable chair as they slowly work their way through some bagels. It was Jon’s idea, eating something plain but calorically dense. Daisy likes the blueberry ones he bought. 

Jon is wearing a skirt she picked out. It’s high waisted, loosely pleated, comes just above his knees. It’s mostly black, but with white and grey texture of tiny dots. Most importantly, it has pockets. Jon likes the texture and the heaviness of the fabric. 

“The skirt is nice,” she says. Jon blushes slightly. 

“I thought I’d never wear one again,” he replies. “It’s so different now. Teenage Jon wouldn’t know what to do with me.”

“God. Sixteen year old Daisy. Well. This would be a surprise.” 

“I was sixteen when Section 28 was repelled.” Jon says. 

“You were sixteen? I was a PC by then!” Daisy gets surprised by her own age regularly, especially when she looks at him. Jon hums slightly. 

“I remember it well. Our drama teacher had the radio on to catch the news all day and it was during her class it was announced on the news. Everyone was really happy.” 

Daisy thinks about being twenty one and still too old. “Did it change anything? In your school, I mean.” 

“My drama teacher announced publicly that she was dating one of the PE teachers and she couldn’t wait to call Ms. Kindrid her wife. That was nice. Scary. But it felt like I might actually be able to grow up and be a person and queer.” 

“I remember that feeling. Same time, only I was twenty one in 2003. It was really lonely. I made my first queer friends shortly before and they threw a party. It was overwhelming, going from ignoring, you know, _girls,_ and then suddenly the country has decided it's okay to talk about it again.”

“Yeah! My drama teacher told us about how they were making progress in the 80’s and then the year before I was _born_ Margaret fucking Thatcher made it illegal to talk about it. My entire life was covered in history that I had to go back and learn.” 

“That’s how everyday here feels too.” 

“Someone should have put Elias and Thatcher in a room together. Would solve all our problems.” 

“Or it would have ended the world,” Daisy quips, before the meaning catches up to her. 

“At least it wouldn’t be our fault.” Jon says, quietly, sadly. 

Daisy really has no idea what to do with that. 

  
  
  


It’s nearing midnight, a few days later, which means Jon is working hard at his desk. Their big online shopping orders have been coming in, which means she’s sitting on the bean bag chair. She's dragged to his office. Jon finds it too hard to get in and out of, but she loves how it doesn’t make any of the less padded parts of her body hurt. 

Daisy hasn’t slept in two days. Jon knows this. She’s been watching, guarding him while he sleeps. It’s not a cause and reaction. Jon offered the phrase third variable: the gnawing hunger keeps her awake and it drives her to protect. 

“If you would like to talk about it, any of it, I am here,” says Jon, pointedly Not Asking. It’s an offering. It’s kind. 

Daisy does, in fact, want to talk about it. 

Daisy’s first important interaction with a cop goes like this:

She was little. Older than she should be, crying like she was. But she was a kid, under ten for sure, acceptable. There’s a cop. She’s kind. She sits beside Daisy on the pavement, and hands her the ugliest fucking stuffed animal she’s seen in her young life. It looks like it’s supposed to be a wolf. 

There’s been cops around her first little flat before. Her parents aren’t good at it, but the big problem is drugs involved. Daisy is four when they overdose. She’s four when she gets the little wolf. A social worker comes and takes her away from their flats. 

This is not Daisy’s last cop. She grows up in foster care, after that. All she wants is to take care of people. All her foster siblings get taken away, or torn apart by whoever is looking after them. Over and over again, social workers with too little attention or time or energy come and look past them, guilty. 

And the only ones who ever have any power are the police, when they get called. The police speak and people listen. It's pretty simple maths. Daisy graduates secondary school mostly out of sheer spite and the rugby coach insisting on her getting her full years in. She turns 18 a month before the end of year 13, and she graduates even though she’s technically homeless. 

The point is that she doesn’t have an uncomplicated relationship with the police before she joins up. But she tells herself that this is the closest thing she’s ever had to getting to do something good and have the power for it to matter. 

It’s oddly validating and deeply upsetting that the police still don’t have the power they need. She gets sectioned, promoted, and gets even less support. It’s nice to be both trusted and feared, and she’s always known how to take a little bit of power and make it stretch as far as it needs to. 

She’s seen so many dead people that she barely flinches when she makes her first kill. There’s a comforting warmth of a wrecked wolf protecting its own. 

  
  
  
  


Jon is knitting. He sits on the two person hammock she bought and set up, with a giant ball of soft looking green yarn. She approaches carefully, trying not to spook him. 

“Knitting?” she asks, trying to keep any judgement from her voice. She hates that shit. 

“Yeah.” Jon has a dumb and soft smile as he pauses his needles and instead strokes the section he’s working on. “It’s nice, texture wise, and it’s something to do with my hands. And there’s always something new to learn about.”

“Lore,” Daisy nods sagely. Jon rolls his eyes, but smiles. 

“Special interest and stim in one neat package.” He goes back to his work. She continues standing, a little helplessly. 

“You can be here. I just don’t really want to talk.”

“Can I talk?” Jon nods. She climbs into the hammock. She’s a very respectable 5’9, Jon’s a sensible 5’7, and both of them are too thin. There’s plenty of fabric to spare despite how the basic mechanics of a hammock smoosh them together. Jon drops his yarn and needles out of the hammock and nearly immediately starts running his fingers over her shirt sleeves. It’s nice. It’s nice to be close together in a situation where the Buried has no hold. 

After some amount of time, gently rocking in the hammock, Jon says. “Daisy, I’m sad.”

“Tell me about that?” 

“He is so unreachable. Martin, I mean. He’s all I have left of, before, I suppose.”

There’s a part of Daisy that aches in sympathy, thinking of losing those she considers hers. 

“I miss him. He’s right there,” Jon takes a deep breath, and points above them at an angle, and Daisy knows if she could follow his finger she’d arrive at Martin. “But he’s so far away.” 

“You could talk to him?” 

“I don’t even know how I would start a conversation anymore.” 

“You do alright with me,” Daisy replies in support. 

“I’ll think about it.” 

  
  


Daisy knows Jon talked to Martin today. He’s staring at his mug on his desk and nearly burst out crying earlier. Daisy is sort of working, but mostly browsing Skip to see if there’s anything that doesn’t seem terrible to eat. 

“I am thinking about gouging my eyes out,” says Jon. “I don’t think I want to. But I can’t stop thinking about it.” 

“Well, you would pretty quickly have new problems.” 

Jon has an odd sort of humour to his voice when he replies,“That’s certainly part of the appeal.” 

Daisy knows that tone, recognizes how it tastes and mostly without thinking if she actually wants to have this conversation: “What’s your history of self harm like?”

“Not great,” Jon answers. 

“Neither,” she replies, in the spirit of fairness. 

“Right. I’m sorry.” 

“Hasn’t been a problem in a while.” It’s true. She’s proud of it, avoiding a relapse since, well, everything. 

“Me too. Just now. Well. It would be different somehow. But it would be too much, I think. Even if it helped.”

“And didn’t kill you.” Jon frowns, as if he was previously filing his own death under “helpful”. Which he probably was. She wants to shake him and make him go to therapy. 

“I would like you to survive.” Daisy says. Jon groans and puts his head on his desk. Dramatic asshole. “Come on, I think you’ll either love or hate bubble tea and either it’ll be interesting.” 

Jon frowns, but it turns out he likes obnoxiously fake watermelon and tapioca pearls. 

They are cuddling. That’s what they’re doing. They are carefully mostly upright, in a reclining loveseat with a weighted blanket over their laps. Jon has his head against her shoulder and she has her arms around him. She isn’t sure if either of them are going to sleep. She isn’t sure if it will matter. 

It’s a Sunday morning. The Archers is doing it’s weekly replay of the week’s six episodes. It’s grounding. She isn’t entirely sure if Jon _likes_ the show, but he more or less memorized the Wikipedia page one day and seems to appreciate them are a touchstone of when in the day and week they are. 

And right now, she can feel Jon’s heartbeat, he can hear hers, both of them have a stim toy in hand, and the world isn’t ending. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> AND THEN NOTHING BAD HAPPENS
> 
> .... I'm in denial. Anyways thank u for reading, I love comments like nothing else.


End file.
